Rapidblog alternative

I’m still using Rapidblog. Just post on Blogger and the posts show up on my Rapidweaver Blog. Only issue at the moment is that the posts do not show up in the RW preview.

RWBlog relies on libraries built for php v5. High Sierra comes with php v7 so preview no longer works, I’m afraid.

Someday we may rewrite RapidBlog or a similar plugin like it – but it will have to be a substantial reinvestment of time, money, and priorities. Unfortunately YourHead operates on a pretty slim budget. (in other words, i’m too broke to do the work, sorry guys. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: )

Until then RapidBlog is in limbo. It continues to function as normal when published to a server that supports php v5 – but cannot preview.

Perhaps Yourhead is willing to hand the source code of RapidBlog over to me.

I’m afraid I’m not able to. Although I own the code and plugin now, one of the contractual agreements I made with LogHound when taking things over was not to publish the code or disclose in any way.

I will point out, however, that all of the current issues are with the PHP libraries (relying on an old version of Pear). They are not closed and are exported verbatim. An enterprising developer could probably replace the requisite libraries and get things working again.

If someone would like to do this dev work, I’d be happy to revenue share the resulting sales (don’t get your hopes up – RB doesn’t generate very much revenue currently).

Isaiah

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That could be because it hasn’t been updated.

In the past I have used Rapidblog as an SEO tool to successfully generate Top 10 google search results for about a dozen clients. There’s nothing else like it.

Can you provide some instruction or point me to where I could learn how to do this?

Thanks.

That could be because it hasn’t been updated.

LOL. The challenge isn’t simply selling software. It is selling software at a profit. RapidBlog is easy to sell, but very very difficult to sell at a profit. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to deduce why. :stuck_out_tongue:

Can you provide some instruction or point me to where I could learn how to do this?

I’m afraid I’ve given you the sum total of the info I know about this problem.

  • It’s an old Pear library (+ dependencies).
  • Pear must be replaced with a more recent version.
  • I presume dependent libs do as well, but I didn’t get that far myself.

I know that’s not much to go on, but I’d be happy answer any questions. Let me know how it goes!

Isaiah

To check you PHP version: open Terminal.app and type ‘php --version’.
If it is 7, you can reinstall 5.6 : https://php-osx.liip.ch/
Install PEAR by googling ‘install php pear mac os x’.

But previewing with RapidBlog is not my problem, that works.
Everything works, except up- and downloading blogposts.

If this isn’t going any further, I think I will analyze the uploaded PHP code, because that part is just right for showing Blogger-posts on your website. In theory, I can do without RapidBlog, and in turn create a HTML-code page with a .php extension and paste the needed PHP code from RapidBlog in there, which works locally and on the server. Then there would be no need anymore to store those posts inside a RW-file.

The disadvantage of this will be that the SiteMap plugin, which can read RapidBlog posts, will no longer find these posts and thus will no longer upload links to these post in the Sitemap-page. Which is a super feature for SEO.

So, not updating RB has more impact then just RB.

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Regards,
Marc

Having the blogs inside the sitemap xml ist just one additional way Google knows to index them. As long as they are linked somewhere (what they are from the blog list), everything is fine.

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Hmm, the RapidBlog is all dynamic, there are no static links to blogposts in the PHP code.
But I think that Google indexes Blogger anyway, and, to get the posts into the ‘air’, I also use dlvr.it to post them on Twitter and Facebook. So yes, the XML is just an additional way.

Update: I got a tip from Yourhead-support to try to :
(a) log out from Google and log back in, but that did not help.
(b) to re-publish all files via menu ‘File -> Re-Publish All Files’. That worked.

What I noticed in the process, is that previously, RapidBlog uploaded all files used in blog-posts to a ‘/files’ folder.
But since the problems started, I saw that it uploads files to a new folder, called ‘/index_files’.
Huh? But only a few files were present in ‘/index_files’.

After the re-publish, RW7 now uploaded all blog-post-files into ‘/index_files’.
I got some ‘GTLJSONRPCErrorDomain error 500’ messages in the process, but after all 571 blog-files were re-published, RapidBlog works again as it used to.

So my problems were caused by the switch from ‘/files’ to ‘/index_files’.
And I have no idea where that change comes from.

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Marc

If uploading all files fixed the issue – the likely problem was that some of the files did not get FTP’d in the last publish – this can happen for a number of reasons, but the mostly likely is simply that the process was interrupted.

Both files and index_files are normal RapidWeaver behaviors. Neither is abnormal or new. That behavior is unlikely to be the source of any problems.

RapidWeaver normally publishes all the associated content of a page into the files folder. However if two pages share the same folder location – then the name of the files folder associated with each page is made unique by adding the name of the page.

Example:
So if you publish A.html and B.html to the folder my_pages then the associated files for each page will be stored in my_pages/A_files and my_pages/B_files respectively.

If I had to guess, I’d say that you changed some of the names or folders or the structure of your site a bit and now your RapidBlog page shares a folder with another page.
This sort of thing tends to cause a lot of changes – and all those changes would have needed to get uploaded. And such a large upload would have taken a long time and been prone to being interrupted. That’s just a wild guess, of course, but it seems like a pretty solid one based on the info at hand.

And… republish all is definitely the correct thing to try first… which is why Christi told you to do that… and why it worked. :slight_smile:

And… it goes without saying, but it obviously wasn’t because of a change to RapidBlog as there haven’t been any. We tidied up things in RapidBlog 3.0 when we took it over from Loghound back in April of 2016 – but have not made any real changes – and have no plans to in future.

Isaiah

The RapidBlog alternative is here : http://marc.vos.net/downloads/blogspot-stack/

It’s a stack, so you need YourHead’s Stacks plugin.

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That’s wonderful! I’ll be sure to check it out. This is long overdue in the sense of meeting a need, and it’s a shame to see good Stacks lie dormant.

In the BlogSpot Stack, is there a way to expand the archives beyond 365 days?

Why can’t we go back as far as we want?

Thanks.

GREAT!!! I go and look for it…

Bought the blogspot-stack after stumbling aroung with the old plug-in from Loghound. It turned out that the code from Loghound was not able to give a result without errors on the new PHP-7 servers of my provider xs4all.nl. Marc did a rewrite in one weekend. Now all is up and running (www.hartvoordeberg.nl).

Marvelous job!

greetings dirk v.

I purchased the stack and found it awesome!!! Marc did a great Job.

There is a new stack for blogger…

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Yes, that saved me a lot of work and… and works amazing!!

Very good…
Glad I could help.

Joe Martin

joemart1951@me.com

I used Marc’s Blogspot Stack, I find it to be an awesome product and the support was amazing, the whole experience was fantastic and the end result looks amazing. Marc went above and beyond to help me get the Blogspot Stack looking exactly how I wanted on my website, it is very easy to use and extensively configurable. Link below:

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I couldn’t recommend Marc’s Blogspot stack highly enough and would purchase other stacks from him in an instance.

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Thank you all for your support!

A new version of Blogspot.stack, v1.2.7, is out now and has some important fixes, including Sparkle-updates, which means you can update to new versions from within Stacks : What’s new in this version

Please everyone, update to this latest version.

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Thanks,
Marc

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